Book Review: Through The Midnight Door by Katrina Monroe

Blacklick, Indiana, is the kind of crumbling small town most people fight to get away from. Meg Finch almost managed it, before collapsing into a strung-together life of gig work and the perpetual struggle to keep her head above water. Her younger sister Esther actually made it all the way out to the Chicago suburbs with a job in project management, a husband, and a twelve-year-old son. Youngest sister Claire didn’t even try to leave, living with her parents while attempting to do good as a social worker for the many desperate families in the area.

Once upon a time, the three sisters were close. That ended one summer when they were kids, as a terrifying encounter with a decaying house and its impossible hallway changed their lives forever. Each girl chose a door. Each girl was given an awful burden. Claire’s was perhaps the most viscerally felt:

Claire froze. She couldn’t tell if the voice had come from the room or inside her own head. The floor rumbled beneath her hands, almost like a purr. The dark seemed to undulate around her, stroking her skin and hair. She thought of the spider on the stairs, but this was different, like if water were solid. The dark bent softly against her arms and neck, velvety and thick. It made her skin crawl.

 

We’re here with you. We’ll always be with you.

 

Her voice crackled with tears. “Who are you?”

 

The darkness pulsed and then she felt the velvety touch move from her neck to her ears, to her nose. It climbed inside and slithered down her throat, viscous and sour. She felt sick, her belly heavy, like she’d swallowed too much water.

Afterward, none of them want to talk about what happened in the house or what they saw or experienced. As they grow older, guilt and shame–some of it entirely unearned–push them further and further apart. But then Claire calls her eldest sister one night, saying she’s tired of the pain and is ready to put an end to it all. A frantic Meg races to the abandoned house to find her sister dead, swinging from a noose in a room at the end of that terrible hallway.

Neither Meg nor Esther can accept the verdict that Claire committed suicide. Driven by grief, they begin to investigate Claire’s life, both together and separately, as their own hurtful history causes them to lash out at one another. Meg, being more introspective but also more passive than her paranoid, impulsive sister, wonders why they’re really making these choices, especially when their inquiries could be putting another at-risk family through unwarranted agony:

She understood why Esther wanted to do it. Meg had come to the same instant conclusion Esther had. It made sense. Here was a guy with a history of violence who was meeting their sister, a woman who would have been responsible for removing his children from his care, and then she ends up dead. Open and shut, right? But then Meg heard Claire say it again in her head: would it make you feel better?

 

Would it? Or were they looking for reasons to believe what’d happened to Claire wasn’t their fault? That they couldn’t have stopped it?

As they begin to unearth what really happened to Claire, they discover, too, the solution to the mystery that festers at the heart of their family’s shaky foundation. Will the truth finally allow the sisters to grant each other absolution and grace? Perhaps just as importantly, will it allow them to forgive themselves?

The almost-physical manifestations of depression, anxiety, and paranoia in this book make perfect monsters for the sisters to battle, even as they find themselves solving far less supernatural crimes. Their prickly relationship, especially, reads so true to life. As an eldest child, I found myself rolling my eyes at Esther in the exact same way I would at my own middle sibling. Perhaps most gratifyingly, I, like Meg, came to appreciate her sister in the end.

Katrina Monroe writes deftly of sibling dynamics and the contradictory compulsion to protect the ones we love by staying away from them. Through The Midnight Door is a thoughtful horror novel for anyone with difficult family relationships exacerbated by mental illness. As it poignantly shows, there is almost always hope for better, if people will only commit themselves to honesty and genuine care for one another.